Tasty, bite-sized bizarreness for brave preteens.
A collection of curious incidents—13, naturally—for unsuspecting readers.
A friend mysteriously vanishes. A kid runs into the devil on the way to school. The figures on a street sign change places. A stain on the school cafeteria’s floor is more than just a stain—it has a mouth. A straight-laced teacher gets a creative form of discipline for her “problematic” classroom-management style. Paper-towel dispensers produce ominous messages. Someone’s missing marker is used to make art that brings to life a new invasive species. Even the shadows get bad ideas. For everything, there’s a price or a consequence. Which kids can beat the odds and figure out a way for their lives to go back to normal? Or, is normal the real myth in this wondrously eerie world? Allen’s debut is mostly plot-focused, a quick (but not too quick) relay race from story to story—the longest of which spans 15 pages. Mostly creepy instead of bone-chillingly terrifying, the collection’s overall tone is more Twilight Zone than Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark. It’s also a textbook example of how horror contextualizes social anxieties, particularly those relevant to school-aged youth. Coleman mixes hand lettering with scratchy, sketchy linework to create single- or double-page black-and-white illustrations that accentuate each story. With a lack of racial descriptors, the cast presumes a white default.
Tasty, bite-sized bizarreness for brave preteens. (Horror. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4366-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Convincing, humorous, warm, and definitely spooky.
Henry, the new boy in Barbara Anne Klein’s Seattle fifth-grade class, dresses oddly, but that isn’t the strangest thing about him.
Henry and narrator Barbara Anne (or Bitsy as her parents and grandmother call her) bond over their need to escape their assigned lunch table, and Barbara Anne soon discovers the subject of Henry’s absorbed sketching at recess: the boy who seems to be haunting him. Irrepressible, strong-minded Barbara Anne is not always aware of her limitations, and Siebel’s voice for her is both funny and warm. Henry battles a respiratory infection throughout much of the story even as he and Barbara Anne begin to realize that young Edgar, Henry’s ghost, did not survive the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1918. A session with a Ouija board and a letter and yearbook discovered in Henry’s attic tell part of the story. Edgar’s father’s journal, found in the public library archives, reveals the rest. Siebel cleverly weaves together the story of the developing friendships among Barbara Anne and her classmates and the story of Edgar’s friendship with Henry’s neighbor, Edgar’s playmate as a small child and now a very old woman. Henry, Barbara Anne, and Edgar present white; classmate Renee Garcia, who looks forward to eventually celebrating her quinceañera, and Barbara Anne’s teacher, Miss Biniam (“she looks like an Ethiopian princess”) are the only main characters of color.
Convincing, humorous, warm, and definitely spooky. (Ghost story. 9-12)Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-93277-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A fitting finale for a top-notch series.
Evie returns once more to the Dark Sun Side, a terrifying land of nightmarish creatures.
This trilogy closer takes place just weeks after 12-year-old Evie narrowly escaped the Dark Sun Side in 2023’s The Nighthouse Keeper. Evie has been living with her aunt Desdemona, believing her parents’ lives were lost in a house fire—but she discovers they’ve been held captive in the Dark Sun Side by the demented creature called the Clackity. Evie, who’s cued white, strikes a bargain with the Clackity and embarks on a series of quests: Succeed, and she gets her parents back; fail, and she risks losing her own life. Accompanied by the lovable Bird, her tattooed companion who’s nestled into her skin and sends her warnings, Evie bravely uses her resourcefulness and altruism to tackle tasks that take her through places like an otherworldly ocean, desert, and forest. The most captivating of these expeditions takes her to the Winterlands, a place that’s striking and chilling in its beautiful descriptions. It’s only in this world that Cáceres’ otherwise evocatively creepy black-and-white illustrations fail to capture the vivid, haunting beauty described in the text. Senf’s storytelling is riveting and wildly imaginative, and her story is populated with unique, otherworldly creatures and characters. Evie’s death-defying crusade makes for a satisfying, compelling closing to the series.
A fitting finale for a top-notch series. (Horror. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781665934602
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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